


back in the beginning

by witticaster



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon, Very Mild Implied Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 10:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18364151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witticaster/pseuds/witticaster
Summary: Hades and Persephone lovingly negotiate the laws of nature





	back in the beginning

Persephone was over and around him, her arms and her hair holding him on dirt so soft that it felt like flour. She'd led him to this place in the garden, away from the thorny plants, poisonous and crushable ones. Fallow ground, she'd said.

"Come home with me," said Hades.

Persephone tilted her chin up. "For how long?"

"Forever."

She smiled. "Nah."

Hades thought he wanted to turn his face when she leaned down to kiss him, but he didn't have the will to want it.

"I thought we were married," he said against her teeth.

She hummed: their agreement, their song.

"I'll make you a queen down there."

"I'm a queen up here." But she was interested.

The morning birds were starting to sound in the dark, singing confused songs to wake the earth. With a thought, he could silence them, but he didn't. It wasn't his place. When the sun rose, she would, too: rise up and away from him, to touch leaves and roots and blossoms instead of his face, his shoulders, his hands, which no one had ever thought to touch.

Already, she was rising. She sat up, but her hands stayed on his chest. No, only one did; the other stretched high into the air. "Feel that?"

He wanted to snatch her fingers back in his, but he raised his hand, too. It didn't reach quite as high as hers. The breeze that skimmed over his fingers was cool.

"That's no summer wind," she said.

"Feels nice to me." He heard his voice like a stranger's. "A break from the heat."

She nodded and said, "But it can't be forever." She took his hand, and hers felt cooler, cooler than it'd been when she'd first touched him. Or maybe he'd just grown used to the heat. "Nothing is."

"My world is."

He told her. He told her that he wished her to lay her eyes on gold, the kind that shone even in the dark. His world was bedrock, consistent, persistent. There was no above without something below. His coins and stones would never wither. Never grow of themselves, but neither would they die. He could change them into new shapes, make glimmering ropes that Persephone could wear. The flowers in her hair were fading. He'd replace them with diamond twins. They'd stay forever fresh.

"Yeah," she said. He could see a strange glint behind her eyes, a hankering in the facets that caught the half-faded moon.

"I need you."

"Then why don't _you_ stay up _here_?" She was smiling, imagining him trying to live in the perennial world, impatient with the constant rising and setting of the sun.

They both had kingdoms to care for.

Persephone leaned away, just for a moment, to the picnic they'd meant to enjoy. He watched the flesh of her stomach stretch as she searched through the basket. There was sweat on her skin: for as long as he'd known her (which wasn't long enough), there was always a sheen on her, warm from within. He pressed his fingers there near her navel, and she laughed. He laughed, too. A caustic sound, like an untuned fiddle, but she didn't mind.

Her weight settled back down on him. She pried a pomegranate in half; some of the seeds burst as she did it, spattering them both with dark red flecks. He hummed the tune that had come to him when no words had been fluid or jagged enough.

She held a handful of seeds. He opened his mouth. She dropped one in, then ate one herself. "I'll come with you," she said. "And then I'll come back. And then I'll come with you, and then…"

"You'll come back." She pressed more seeds against his mouth. Too many: some of them fell into the dirt. Would she bury them there, care for them, make a grove of these trees in the fallow field? He spoke with the juice still between his teeth: "Or I could stay with you. And go down again, and-"

"The earth can die and renew, lover," said Persephone. "But the dead gotta stay dead."

He wanted to look away. He did. "And underground."

She ate more seeds, didn't drop any. "You want me to sign something? One of your damned contracts?"

"No," he said. Necessity demanded the answer.

She would come back. In the times away, she would occupy herself, sowing the fields, brightening the sun, coaxing the world into form. He could occupy himself, too. He would be like her: he would create. He would make something out of his dirt, his clay, his rocks. He couldn't make anything grow, but there was always the metal sleeping in the earth. It could be coaxed awake, in its own way. But he'd be alone amongst the dead, and she'd be swarmed by the living. There were many ways she could occupy herself.

He desired her name in ink, above his.

Her fingers were calloused. They loved his cheek. "When I come back, you'll be waiting?"

"Every time."

"Every time. That'll take some getting used to."

It was unnatural for either of them to be out of place. What they chose to do, that would be the new nature of the world. They'd create absence and its lover abundance, and the world would know the difference. It'd be a new earth, dead and alive, fickle and predictable. There would be the waiting, always the waiting, for something to change or remain.

The sun rose again, and when it set, the leaves felt their blood changing color.

**Author's Note:**

> ???? hello, reader, if you made it this far! you're a cool dude


End file.
